In the past telecommunications services evolved slowly. In the beginning, the relatively few types of telecommunications services available were tightly coupled to the hardware infrastructures delivering the various services. For example, public switched telephone networks were built to deliver telephonic voice communication. Separate broadcast and cable networks were developed to transmit television. The need to exchange data between computers led to the development of large area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs). The need to communicate across different networks eventually led to the development of the internet. The advent of wireless mobile telephones led to large cellular networks to support wide ranging mobile communications. In each of these examples, huge investments in infrastructure were required by those who would provide the various services to consumers.
A legacy of this evolution was that the business systems supporting various telecommunications services evolved separately as well. Order processing systems, provisioning systems, billing systems, customer relationship management systems (CRM), network monitoring systems, and other support systems developed and grew side by side with the hardware systems developed to deliver the various services. The operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS) developed for specific services were all designed and adapted toward the particular service for which they were intended. There was little or no overlap between systems developed for different services. Indeed, since different services were typically delivered by different service providers there was little need for support systems to serve more than one telecommunications service.
This vertical service delivery approach is illustrated in FIG. 1. Two existing services 102, 112 are shown. The first service 102 includes its own order processing system 104, provisioning system 106, service delivery systems 108 and monitoring systems 110. The second service 112 also has its own order processing system 114, provisioning system 116, service delivery systems 118 and monitoring systems 130. According to the old model, rolling out a new service 122 often required developing an entirely new order processing system 124, a new provisioning system 126, new service delivery systems 128 and new monitoring systems 130. This approach may have been acceptable in an era when new services were developed infrequently and where the expected return from providing a new service justified building an entirely new service delivery infrastructure. However, those days are past.
Today's telecommunications marketplace is much more dynamic. In the past telecom companies typically concentrated on delivering one or two primary services. Today's telecom operators, however, typically provide a multitude of different services. For example it is not uncommon for a single telecom operator to provide wire-line communications services including voice, data, and cable television, as well as wireless communications services. The accelerating convergence on TCP/IP as the preferred service delivery transport layer further increases the opportunities for telecom operators to develop and deliver entirely new telecommunications services and products. Nonetheless, integrating new services with a telecom's existing OSS and BSS systems remains a bottleneck in the process of developing and implementing new services. Today, in order to roll out a new service a telecom operator has but two choices, build a standalone system including all of the infrastructure and support systems as was done in the past, or integrate the new service with existing systems. Neither is a particularly attractive option.
Obviously building the service delivery infrastructure and supporting OSS and BSS systems from scratch will be time consuming and expensive. This is an unsatisfactory proposition in an industry and era when nimbleness and speed are essential and in which the ability to roll out and deliver new products and services will be one of the key drivers of market success. Integrating new services with the existing service infrastructures and existing OSS/BSS systems may be a somewhat more attractive solution, but significant obstacles remain.
FIG. 2 shows a sample block diagram 40 illustrating the potential interactions between a plurality of new services 144 and existing OSS/BSS systems. As can be seen, each additional service will require significant efforts to integrate the service within the existing OSS/BSS systems environment. The effort to integrate systems in this manner each time a new service is created can be very expensive and time consuming. Making matters worse, each additional service, and the associated changes, patches, and stop-gap measures taken to integrate the new service with the OSS/BSS systems has the potential to degrade the performance of the OSS/BSS systems as the OSS/BSS systems are called upon to do more and different tasks from those for which they were originally designed. In other words, scalability may become an issue.
As the telecommunications industry continues to evolve, the ability to quickly develop and roll out new product and service offerings and the ability to make such new product and service offerings available on a large scale and on a wide range of different technology platforms will be key factors in allowing telecom operators to remain competitive. New flexible operating systems are necessary in which new products and services may be added, dropped, repackaged and bundled with other products and services in a quick and efficient manner. The ability to quickly adopt new products and services will likely generate new opportunities for generating revenue and provide opportunities for partnering with third party service providers which heretofore would not have been possible due to the difficulties inherent in integrating new services.